 | This articledoes notcite anysources. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. Find sources: "Link contract" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Alink contract is an approach to data control in a distributeddata sharing network. Link contracts are a key feature of theXDI specifications under development atOASIS.
In XDI, a link contract is a machine-readable XDI document that governs the sharing of other XDI data. Unlike a conventional Web link, which is essentially a one-dimensional "string" that "pulls" a linked document into a browser, a link contract is a graph of metadata (typically inJSON) that can actively control the flow of data from a publisher to a subscriber by either "push" or "pull". The flow is controlled by the terms of the contract, which can be as flexible and extensible as real-world contracts, i.e., link contracts can govern:
Like real-world contracts, link contracts can also refer to other link contracts. Using this design, the vast majority of link contracts can be very simple, referring to a very small number of more complex link contracts that have been carefully designed to reflect the requirements of common data exchange scenarios (e.g., business cards, mailing lists, e-commerce transactions, website registrations, etc.)
Link contracts have been proposed as a key element of digital trust frameworks such as those published by the non-profitOpen Identity Exchange.